Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich Such a Character! Writing Family June 10 to June 15, 2018 Tuition: $600 Workshop: 1-4pm Discipline: Nonfiction/Memoir OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

Who, reading Mary Karr’s memoirs, could fail to imagine her knife-wielding, smart-talking Texan mother? Who, reading Patricia Lockwood, can forget her father, the Rush Limbaugh-quoting, Arby’s-snarfing, farting priest? When we write memoir or autobiographical fiction, our characters are drawn from the people we love, the people we know best—those about whom we may have said our whole lives, “They’re such characters!” So why is it that sometimes those characters appear the blurriest in our drafts? Is it possible that how close we are to someone might be the very thing that complicates turning them into an effective character? In this class, we’ll use daily writing and revision exercises to develop the characters that just happen to be our family members. We’ll also discuss exceptional examples of family member characterization in published memoirs and autobiographical novels. Come prepared with family stories and ready to write!

Biography

Alexandria (Alex) Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, and The Sydney Press Herald, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award, and has been translated into nine languages. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harpers, and many other publications. They are an assistant professor at Bowdoin College and teach in the Pan-European low-residency MFA program. They live in Portland, Maine, with an enormous puppy.